SAP unveils ‘big data’ predictive insights strategy

The software giant says its new offering aims "to equip more people with a modern, user-friendly, graphically stunning tool for predictive modelling and advanced visualisation". It sounds fancy, but SAP's objective is real enough – enabling organisations to see and act on hitherto hidden opportunities and risks, buried in the mass of Big Data – by finding correlations and conductin what ifs at lighting speed, via the SAP HANA database platform. "There is a lot of untapped insight that could be exposed from exploding internal and external, structured and unstructured data sources," explains Dan Vesset, vice president, Business Analytics solutions at analyst IDC. "Predictive capabilities help businesses explore and identify the opportunities and risks hiding in the sea of all that big data," he continues. "SAP's integrated approach to predictive analytics helps more users learn not only what has happened, but also understand why it happened, what might happen and what the best course of action is." For users, the big deal is that, whereas predictive modelling has traditionally been the domain of statisticians and data scientists, with this new suite users – and specifically business analysts – gain direct control. SAP gives examples of potential insights as including: understanding how historical sales, costs and other key metrics translate to future performance; seeing how predicted results compare with goals; revealing the causes of customer satisfaction and employee turnover; and showing how past and emerging trends impact the bottom line. "Analytics solutions from SAP are powering a decision-making revolution for businesses that recognise that the future starts a second from now, not a week or a year from now," comments John Schweitzer, senior vice president and general manager for analytics at SAP. "That's why predictive applications must be intuitive, where people work powered by real-time performance... More people in the business can explore, visualise and share insights from exploding volumes and varieties of data."